June 4, 2003
Elger Esser at Sonnabend
With a signature low horizon line and muted color palette, Esser’s Cap-Antifer photographs (2000) of tide pools, beaches, and limestone cliffs follow the footsteps of Guy de Maupassant, who researched this area of the Normandy coast on behalf of Gustave Flaubert in 1877. Every detail is fastidiously recorded by the camera, a mechanical metaphor of the project to acquire encyclopedic knowledge undertaken by Bouvard and Pécuchet, the title characters in the book Flaubert was preparing at the time.
Maupassant’s research was unused by his friend, but Esser picks up where the writer left off, recording each location detailed in their correspondence. He pairs the rigor of this endeavor with the romanticism of late nineteenth century painters, such as Courbet and Monet, who also spent time on these shores. The ten photographs are suffused with a dreamy quality that haunts their precise rendering of churning water, the occasional patch of vegetation, and large expanses of pale rock and paler sky. It is an unexpected project, akin to outlining in painstaking detail a world that may not quite exist.
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I struggled with this one and it seems a bit lifeless. Flash Art runs one issue for the months of July, August, and September, so I need to make sure to practice by writing to imagined deadlines for the rest of the summer.
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It also appears that Flash Art is putting its "New York, New York" column online. Click here to see the exact same Thomas Struth and Gillian Carnegie notes I posted here but with formatting mistakes. The Esser and Leonard pieces are for this column in the next issue.